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Same-sex marriage, pot lobbies take cause to D.C.

By September, Freedom to Marry spent nearly twice as much on federal lobbying as all of 2011. | AP Photo

“The fact that they are claiming victory because they won in four deep-blue states is absurd,” Brown said. “Congress is not going to repeal DOMA. That’s just not going to happen. You can say all you want that the nation is at a turning point, but that’s just an exercise in myth-making.”

Also feeling good after November are the pro-marijuana legalization groups, which are celebrating ballot initiatives legalizing recreational use of the drug in Colorado and Washington.

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Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said he remembers when members of his group, along with other pro-marijuana lobbyists, were treated as “lepers” on Capitol Hill, and congressmen would often return contributions from their political action committees.

“Now the tables have turned,” St. Pierre said. “That says a lot.”

St. Pierre said he saw more progress on Capitol Hill on marijuana legalization in the two weeks following the election than he had in the past two years and expects NORML’s federal lobbying activity to increase dramatically.

“Most notably that Wednesday, we had no less than three or four congressional offices saying, ‘Get up here on the Hill for preliminary talks for a legalization bill,’” he said.

The group is also trying to persuade mega-donors to fund a national advertising campaign to bring similar ads that aired in Colorado and Washington to the national stage, St. Pierre said.

Steve Fox, director of government relations for the Marijuana Policy Project, said the group will be pushing for legalization legislation similar to a bill sponsored by former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) that called for regulating marijuana the same way as alcohol.

Both groups acknowledged that California remains the biggest target to pass a legalization ballot initiative because it could expedite federal reform. Besides federal legalization of marijuana, the groups are fighting to keep the federal government from enforcing anti-marijuana laws in Colorado and Washington state as the Justice Department continues to review the laws.

Bolstering their efforts in D.C. could even mean forming a pro-marijuana super PAC.

“We’ll see,” Fox said. “We’re definitely talking about the various ways we could be more politically active.”

Former Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.), former White House drug policy adviser Kevin Sabet, and David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, launched Project SAM this week to lobby against legalization of marijuana.

“It’s just shocking as a public health issue that we seem to be looking the other way as this legalization of marijuana becomes really glamorous,” Kennedy told The Associated Press.

Another group, The National Fraternal Order of Police, is also planning to counter the efforts to legalize marijuana.

“The sentiment within the law enforcement community, which has to deal with the effects of addictive drugs, is that we’re not going to sit on our hands and watch these people misrepresent,” said the group’s executive director, Jim Pasco. “The country is going to hell in a handbasket. … People are worried about their Social Security and health care, and these people are worried about getting high.”